Opening with metallic computer-generated scorpions battling
in a scorching desert wasteland, 3000 Miles to Graceland announces
itself as one helluva nasty movie. A comedic wallow in antiheroic
violence, the movie vomits off the screen, as if director Demian
Lichtenstein--obviously a veteran of music videos--had mainlined
amphetamines before stepping behind his oh-so-busy camera. In
a futile attempt to out-Woo John Woo, Lichtenstein goes to extremes
to achieve a kind of absurd in-your-face exhilaration, and for additional
thrills, the movie gives second-billing to Kevin Costner in the most
vile role of his career. As leather-clad Elvis impersonator and Presley
bastard child Thomas Murphy, Costner's like a black-sheep brother
to Raising Arizona's biker from hell.

With four accomplices including a fellow Elvis worshipper named
Michael (Kurt Russell), Murphy storms a Vegas casino for a $3.2
million robbery that turns into a haywire bloodbath. Partners are
eliminated, double-crosses abound, and Michael connects with a
trashy sexpot (Courteney Cox Arquette) whose preteen son (David
Kaye) is a precocious criminal in training. Murphy's on their trail,
FBI agents are on Murphy's, and gradually things get really nasty.
We're supposed to laugh at the blackness of it all, and sometimes
the ballsy humor scores a bull's-eye. The road-movie action
accommodates several twists of plot, and while Russell's enjoying
a semireprise of his performance in John Carpenter's Elvis, there's
something perversely thrilling about Costner's deadpan ruthlessness.
But really, how amoral can one movie be without wearing out its
welcome? Frenetically depraved, 3000 Miles to Graceland is like
exotic roadkill: morbidly fascinating until you get a whiff of its
stench. --Jeff Shannon